VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Oracle Administrator's Guide

Backing Up and Recovering the Database Using Storage Checkpoints Prerelease 8 September 2005, 8:55am
176 VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle Administrator’s Guide
Backing Up and Recovering the Database Using Storage
Checkpoints
Storage Checkpoints can be created by specifying one of the following options: online, offline, or
instant. To create a Storage Checkpoint with the online option, the database should be online and
you must enable ARCHIVELOG mode for the database. For the offline option, the database should
be offline.
During the creation of the Storage Checkpoint, the tablespaces are placed in backup mode. Because
it only takes a few seconds to take a Storage Checkpoint, the extra redo logs generated while the
tablespaces are in online-backup mode are very small. You can roll back the entire database or
individual tablespaces or datafiles to an online or offline Storage Checkpoint. After the rollback is
complete, you may roll the database forward to restore the database if you have used an online
Storage Checkpoint.
For the instant option, the database should be online and it can be running in either ARCHIVELOG
or NOARCHIVELOG mode. You can only roll back the entire database to an instant Storage
Checkpoint. Rolling back individual tablespaces or datafiles to an instant Storage Checkpoint is not
possible. After the rollback is complete, you need to perform database recovery. Rolling the
database forward is not supported; that is, you cannot apply archived redo logs.
To allow the easiest recovery, always keep ARCHIVELOG mode enabled, regardless of whether
the database is online or offline when you create Storage Checkpoints.
Verifying a Storage Checkpoint Using the Command Line
After creating a Storage Checkpoint and before using it to back up or restore a database, you can
verify that the Storage Checkpoint is free of errors using the procedure below.
Usage Notes
◆ See the dbed_ckptcreate(1M) and dbed_ckptmount(1M) manual pages for more
information.
▼ To verify that a Storage Checkpoint is error-free using the command line
1. Create and mount a Storage Checkpoint:
$ /opt/VRTS/bin/dbed_ckptcreate -S PROD -H /oracle/product -o
online
Creating online Storage Checkpoint of database PROD.
Storage Checkpoint Checkpoint_903937870 created.
$ mkdir /tmp/ckpt_ro